Voltaire arrived in London in the autumn of , and what had begun partly as self-imposed exile became a crucially formative period for him. In truth, he was a philosopher before coming to England, and it would be more accurate to say that Voltaire came to England a poet and left it a prose writer. Voltaire thought of himself first and foremost as a poet, and during his long life he would never abandon the writing of verse, for which he had a remarkable facility many of his letters are sprinkled with seemingly spontaneous passages of verse.
It is hardly coincidental, therefore, that before returning to France in , Voltaire began writing his first two major essays in prose: a history, the Histoire de Charles XII , and a book about the English, which is now best known under the title Lettres philosophiques , but was first published in English translation London as the Letters Concerning the English Nation. He had turned fifty and was now the leading poet and dramatist of his day; perhaps even Voltaire did not imagine that the works which would make him even more celebrated still lay in the future.
Throughout his career, however, Voltaire was prone to involvement in literary quarrels, and his time in Berlin was no exception; his attack on Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis, president of the Berlin Academy, caused Frederick II to lose patience with him.
They corresponded on literary and philosophical matters, and Voltaire sent Frederick many of his works in manuscript. Their exchange of more than seven hundred letters remains as an extraordinary literary achievement in its own right. The Lisbon earthquake of November may have disturbed his philosophical certainties and caused him to doubt the Leibnizian Optimism which Alexander Pope had helped to popularize, but it did not disturb his new-found personal happiness.
His prose response to the catastrophe, in Candide , took longer to mature and was published in Geneva turned out not to be the model republic that Voltaire had imagined or hoped it was, and after a number of tussles with clerical authority, he resolved to leave the city. A return to Paris would not have been welcomed by the government, so he purchased a house and estate at Ferney, where he installed himself in — on French soil now, but within striking distance of the border.
It was in this symbolically marginal position that Voltaire was to live for the rest of his life. But this new-found role did not mean that, like Candide, Voltaire had found happiness in cultivating his garden and in ignoring the world beyond. The stability of his base at Ferney seems to have given Voltaire the opportunity over the following years to launch and encourage the campaigns which soon made him the most famous writer in Europe.
As Voltaire died in , it looks like this is one mystery that will remain unsolved. This was not the case in the 18th century. He writes in the Philosophical Dictionary:. Eating meat can drive you mad?! I mentioned above that there were very strict censorship laws in the 18th century. This meant that speaking out against religion, royalty, or the government was strictly off limits.
Unfortunately for Voltaire, these were a few of his favorite things to criticize. Once more in Voltaire is imprisoned in Bastille and then exiled, this time to England, where he stayed for 3 years. There, he continued to speak his mind with his book Letters on the English, which again angered the French government, causing Voltaire to go into hiding for nearly 15 years in a small town outside of Paris.
Poor guy! But there is one thing that makes them easier: coffee! Well, it turns out that Voltaire shared that opinion, as the author is said to have drank as many as 40 cups of coffee a day.
Find Le Procope in the 6th arrondissement. Voltaire is also said to have written up to 18 hours a day. The 40 cups are making more and more sense…. Most of us have heard the story of the apple that fell on the head of Sir Isaac Newton, causing a major eureka moment in the discovery of gravity. Although the two never met, Voltaire played a big part in spreading the word with his book Elements of the Philosophy of Newton. In fact, Voltaire was one of the first to write the story of how Newton discovered gravity through an apple!
Not only did Voltaire help popularize Newton, his books and essays were considered to be more serious than the poetry and plays he was famous for. The book was quickly banned.
Only a year later, he published The Philosophical Dictionary —an encyclopedic dictionary with alphabetically arranged articles that criticize the Roman Catholic Church and other institutions.
In it, Voltaire is concerned with the injustices of the Catholic Church, which he sees as intolerant and fanatical. At the same time, he espouses deism, tolerance, and freedom of the press. It represents the culmination of his views on Christianity, God, morality, and other subjects. Voltaire had an enormous influence on the development of historiography through his demonstration of fresh new ways to look at the past.
Voltaire broke from the tradition of narrating diplomatic and military events, and emphasized customs, social history, and achievements in the arts and sciences. The Essay traced the progress of world civilization in a universal context, thereby rejecting both nationalism and the traditional Christian frame of reference. Voltaire was also the first scholar to make a serious attempt to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks and emphasizing economics, culture, and political history.
He treated Europe as a whole, rather than a collection of nations. He was the first to emphasize the debt of medieval culture to Middle Eastern civilization, and consistently exposed the intolerance and frauds of the church over the ages. In his criticism of the French society and existing social structures, Voltaire hardly spared anyone. He perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a static and oppressive force useful only on occasion as a counterbalance to the rapacity of kings, although all too often, even more rapacious itself.
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